Context matters
Work from the information relevant to the task, rather than a convincing answer in isolation.
Applied intelligence
Intelligence with a useful role.
Curiosity, applied.
An intelligent feature should earn its place in a workflow. Our interest is in assistance that brings context, reduces repetitive work and leaves people able to judge the result.
Explore the thinkingThoughtful by design. Better with time.The Bervyn approach
Where does assistance help, and where should a person decide?
An area of inquiry · The Bervyn approachKeep review close
Give people an opportunity to inspect and adjust a generated response or draft.
Design the handoff
Think about uncertainty and escalation from the beginning, including the context a person needs to take over.
Separate assistance from responsibility
An AI-assisted feature can draft, summarize, retrieve or suggest. Those are different roles, and each needs a clear boundary. A suggested support reply is not the same as an approved action on a customer account. A generated outreach draft is not evidence that the underlying prospect information is correct.
ThreadHive and Zintara illustrate two different settings for this question: customer support and prospect communication. In both, the surrounding workflow matters. A person needs to understand the available context, inspect the output where appropriate and decide what should happen next.
Make evaluation specific to the task
A useful evaluation begins with examples of the work the feature is supposed to do. Include ordinary questions, missing information and cases where a plausible answer would still be wrong. Decide what a satisfactory result looks like before comparing outputs.
OpenAI’s evaluation documentation describes a process for testing model behavior against defined criteria. We are interested in how that kind of structured evaluation can be paired with product review: not only whether a response meets a rubric, but whether the interface communicates uncertainty and makes the next action clear.
Design for the moment assistance is not enough
A system should have a sensible path when it cannot complete a task confidently. That might be a request for more information, a draft awaiting review or a handoff to a person. The important detail is the context carried forward so the next participant does not have to start again.
These pages describe questions that guide our thinking, not a claim of a universal benchmark or published research result. The relevant criteria depend on the product, the available information and the consequences of an incorrect response.
Questions in a product context
Where the thinking
meets everyday work.
These are areas of interest and guiding questions behind our work, not claims of published research results.
ANOTHER QUESTION WORTH ASKINGDeveloper systemsThe thinking becomes the thing.
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